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Comment by jaredmcateer | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know how is Doctype versioning going to work with W3Cs snapshoting of the living standard? Or are browsers just going to ignore W3C and stick to implementing WHATWGs spec?

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I think even the W3C rejected DOCTYPE versioning, it is still just <!DOCTYPE html>.

No browser ever paid any attention to the version of the HTML specified. The only use for DOCTYPE—and the reason it remains in HTML5—is "doctype switching", i.e. different rendering modes are triggered in the browsers. You can use "html", "html5", "html6.2" or "foobarbaz" as your doctype, the effect will be the same—they will all trigger standards compliant mode.

>'You can use "html", "html5", "html6.2" or "foobarbaz" as your doctype, the effect will be the same—they will all trigger standards compliant mode.' //

You're wrong if your asserting that any doctype produces the same results globally but it probably doesn't matter unless you're targeting legacy UA.

See e.g. "Appendix: Handling of Some Doctypes in text/html" at https://hsivonen.fi/doctype/ or Eric Meyer's http://archive.oreilly.com/pub/a/network/2000/04/14/doctype/... (for MacIE5 ... like I said it probably won't matter!).

Speaking of IE/Mac, that's the reason why the HTML DOCTYPE now is `<!doctype html>`. If it hadn't been for IE/Mac, it'd be `<!doctype>`.

I have vague memories of Frames not working under the HTML4 Strict doctype

Maybe but if you use real DOCTYPE such as <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd"> then you will see huge difference in rendering.

> Or are browsers just going to ignore W3C and stick to implementing WHATWGs spec?

Well, do you think browser vendors will just stop implementing new features because the W3C decides that HTML 5 finished?

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